Floodlights are available in two broad types, i.e., area and directional. As the name suggests, the former are used to illuminate large areas such as parking lots. Directional floodlights provide a smaller field of illumination and are popular with architects, lighting designers and building owners as a way to visually "highlight" certain building and landscape features and improve the nighttime appearance and ease of use of buildings and grounds.
Directional floodlights are used for such purposes as "uplighting" the foliage of trees, illuminating stairs and walkways and emphasizing (by illumination) a particular architectural or structural feature. And the improvement can be dramatic--one need only compare a darkened or poorly-illuminated property to one selectively illuminated by well-sized, well-placed directional floodlights to appreciate the aesthetic differences.
A large property may require a dozen or even several dozen well-placed floodlights for the purpose. And as architects and lighting designers are well aware, these floodlights are likely to require differing lamps to provide differing levels of illumination. Lamps used for outdoor floodlight illumination cover a range of lamp sizes (both physical size and wattage rating) including MR 16 low voltage lamps, PAR 20, PAR 30 and
38 line voltage lamps and high intensity discharge (HID) lamps. (The acronym "PAR" is recognized in the industry as meaning a lamp with a parabolic aluminized reflector.)
A common practice of manufacturers of directional floodlights is to make a separate set of floodlight hardware for each lamp size to be used. The resulting multiplicity of components incrementally increases manufacturing costs and has a significant (and unfavorable) impact upon inventory, both for the manufacturer and for the contractor called upon to install the floodlights. That is, both the manufacturer and contractor must keep track of a larger number of component parts and run the increased risk of loss of some.
And that is not all. Architects and lighting designers are justifiably concerned that each floodlight be capable of being precisely directed toward the particular feature to be illuminated. This means that the floodlight should have a mounting arrangement that permits a wide range of aiming angles.
Directional floodlights involve another consideration, namely, installation space. While directional floodlights for the largest lamp noted above, the
38 lamp, are not particularly large, even modest space savings can be meaningful. (A PAR 38 lamp has a lens diameter of about 4.75 inches, i.e., about 12 cm.)
A new directional floodlight which better responds to the needs of architects, lighting designers and contractors and which provides certain manufacturing economies would be an important advance in the art.